CHAPTER THREE
Sarat hunched by the front porch, waiting for her mother to return from Eliza Polk’s house. She’d gone there to see about a man.
Nearby, Simon struggled to climb onto the roof of the house. Over the last three days, he’d tried a dozen times to hoist his frame over the edge. He knew that the solar panels began to weaken if they weren’t wiped down every other day, and that without regular chlorination the water from the rain tank began to smell faintly of eggs. With every passing day his inability to complete these responsibilities gnawed at him.
Once again he set the ladder in the dirt against the side of the shipping container. Here the earth was softened by runoff from the nearby standing shower, and the legs of the ladder sank slightly into the mud.
At Simon’s insistence, the twins braced the ladder on both sides, trying to keep it steady. Standing on the top rung, he readied to leap and hike himself onto the roof.
“OK,” he said, wiping the midday sweat from his hands. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Sarat and Dana replied in unison.
Simon braced his hands against the edge of the container. On his tiptoes he peered over the top.
“Hold it steady,” he yelled at his sisters.
“We are,” Sarat replied.
“No, hold it so it doesn’t move.”
“We are!”
Simon screwed up his courage. He thought about the ease with which his father did such labor—how, even when he came home late at night from the shirt factory, his fingers red and raw from stitching, he happily took on the chores of the house: patching a hole in the rain tank, re-boarding the windows after a freak storm, making flour of the sorghum grain with the old hand-crank mill. He recalled the sound of the crank squeaking as it pulverized the grain to fine dust—it was the sound of work.
Simon steadied his feet on the top rung. “One, two, three!” he cried, and jumped as high as he could. With his hands still clamped on the edge of the container he rose, his chest level with the roof. For a moment he was weightless, suspended in air. He tried to pull himself over the top, but like a seesaw unevenly weighted, he leaned a little forward and then tumbled back. He landed with a fat thud, neck-first in the soft earth.
The twins yelped and backed away from the ladder. Sarat watched her brother lie on the ground, mesmerized by the violence of his collision, the way his impact made the earth spit itself up. Dana screamed at the mud stains that suddenly covered her dress.
Simon lay still for the better part of a minute, the wind knocked out of him. Finally he groaned and began to lift himself.
“Never mind,” he told his sisters. “You’re holding it all wrong.”
“Oh my God, just wait for Daddy to come do it,” Dana said. “You got mud everywhere.” She stormed into the house to change. Simon followed.
Sarat remained outside, looking at the place where Simon had fallen. She knelt to the ground and dug with her hands a small trench in the dirt from the edge of the shower stall to the indentation Simon’s fall had made in the earth. Then she turned the tap and let the water flow from the showerhead. Slowly the runoff trickled into the trench. From there it flowed as a miniature river and filled the void of Simon’s crater, a newborn sea in the shape of a boy.
“Turn that off,” Simon said, reemerging from the house in clean clothes. “You’re wasting water.”
NIGHT FELL. The children ate dinner alone, their mother still at Polk’s place across the field. They ate sandwiches of stale bread and preserved pork that came in tin cans labeled in a language they could not understand—an import from the aid ships, given to them by Santa Muerte. In recent days, their neighbor had started coming over more frequently and with more gifts: food of higher quality, better clothes.
The canned meat had the texture of soaked erasers, rubbery against the teeth. When they were finished, the children ate the last of Polk’s mud pie, its cream cheese frosting cracked and hard after two days in the refrigerator.
Sarat watched the river. All day she had seen more boats than usual coming across from the eastern banks, and now in the darkness the traffic intensified. She heard the sound of muffled fossil motors about a mile upriver, and occasionally could even make out the voices of unseen men barking commands.
“Is that Daddy?” Dana asked.
“No,” Simon replied. “It’s the rebels.”
“Who are the rebels?”
“Fighters.” Simon looked at his sister to see if she comprehended the word. “They’re on our side in the war against the North.”
“Mama says Daddy’s in the North,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go see him there.”
“Mama’s lying,” Simon said.
Dana turned to her twin, incredulous. “He called Mama a liar!” She turned back to her brother. “I’m telling.”
“You think Dad would just take off for the North without us?” Simon said. “He didn’t take nothing but a couple of papers with him. Didn’t even take a change of clothes. Something bad happened and Mama won’t tell us what.”
Dana shook her head. “Mama says Daddy’s in the North,” she repeated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
THE BOATS the children heard were rebel ships, moving soldiers and supplies to the oil fields on the western front. They docked near Eliza Polk’s house, where they set up a temporary encampment, and where Martina Chestnut came at her neighbor’s invitation to talk to a rebel commander about sanctuary.
The Polks’ house was made of four trailer homes laid in a square. They were prefabricated blocks with vinyl siding and sloped tin roofing.
Normally quiet, Eliza Polk’s land was chaotic with the turbulence of incoming rebels. Martina emerged from the sorghum field to find dozens of men, almost all of them teenagers, moving about the home. In a chain of passing hands they hauled wooden crates and burlap sacks from the unlit boats to the trailers. The rebels carried small portable radios that crackled with orders to prepare for the arrival of more incoming ships. By the riverfront, a boy sat flashing a standing light in sharp bursts to the vessels passing through the dark water.
They wore tattered uniforms of no consistent color or style, composed of whatever was available to them—black jeans, cargo vests, duck hunter’s camouflage, fatigues from foreign armies smuggled aboard the aid ships at the request of the rebel leaders. Their weapons were also smuggled in, or else salvaged from the attics and basements of parents and grandparents—the guns often older than the boys who carried them. They were, to a man, untrained and ill-equipped, and ahead of them to the west lay certain death at the hands of a superior army. But behind them, in the dead-end towns where they were born, lay a slower kind of death—death at the hands of poverty and boredom and decay.
Martina stood at the edge of the field, watching them. In the central garden, they had set up a makeshift command table. On the table lay a large contour map of the Louisiana-Texas border. A few of the older men were assembled around the table, marking the map with various pins and highlighters. Occasionally, they looked up to address the younger fighters, who went about hauling crates and erecting tents. One boy, who could not have been more than seventeen, scaled the Polks’ river-facing trailer and attempted to fly the rattlesnake flag of the United Rebels from the roof, but was ordered down by an older, more discreet superior.
Near the trailer’s front entrance, Martina spotted Eliza Polk. She stood waiting at the front steps as a couple of rebels moved her suitcases from the home to one of the boats docked nearby.
Polk saw Martina and called her over. As she approached the trailer, Martina could feel the eyes of the boys on her, cold and suspicious. But they said nothing.
Polk hugged her neighbor. “Oh, honey, honey,” she said. “It all happened so fast.”
“I thought you’d said it was just the commander coming.”
Polk shook her head. “The Blues are moving east from the Texas oil fields,” she said. “Our boys are going out to meet them. They say if they move fast enough they can keep them from getting any further into Louisiana.”
Martina looked around her for someone who fit the description of a field commander. “Is he here?” she asked.
“Yes, honey. But he’s busy. He won’t talk to no one but his men.”
“Point him out to me.”
“Just wait a while,” Polk pleaded. “Won’t do no good to try talking to him now.”
“Show me where he is.”
Reluctantly, Polk guided Martina to a man at the table in the garden. He was tall and skinny, perhaps five or six years younger than Martina. He wore a neatly trimmed beard that narrowed down to the upper tip of his sternum like an arrowhead. He was dressed in black, from his boots to his military cap. Around him, many of the fighters seemed to hover in elongated orbits, rushing to various parts of the temporary encampment to fulfill his orders before returning to be given a new assignment. He spoke softly enough that, until she was standing directly opposite him at the map table, Martina could not make out a word he said.
When he saw her, the field commander said nothing. He looked over at Polk.
“This is my neighbor I told you about,” Polk said. “The one whose husband was martyred.”
“He wasn’t martyred,” the man said. “He died.”
The field commander was silent once again. The men around him seemed to regard Martina with hostility, but in his eyes there was only stillness.
“I understand you keep a house near Vicksburg for the martyrs’ widows,” Martina said. “A safe place for the women and the children.”
The field commander did not respond.
“I have two little girls and a son, just babies the three of them,” Martina continued. “Their father’s dead and we got no means to support ourselves.” She turned to Polk. “Ms. Polk here’s our only neighbor, and her generosity’s kept us from starving, but she’s leaving now. All I ask is you let us go with her to Vicksburg, where no harm will come to my children. I don’t ask anything more.”
“Can’t be done,” the field commander responded.
“Why not? We can be packed in an hour. We can go right now, just the clothes on our back.”
“We keep a home for the kin of martyrs,” the field commander said. “Unless you got some other man died fighting for the cause, that ain’t you.”
He turned back to the maps on the table, and quickly around him the fighters resumed their orbit.
“C’mon honey,” Polk said, taking Martina by the arm. “Let’s leave them be for now. We’ll sort something out, I know we can.”
Martina pushed Polk’s hand away.
“Your men killed my husband,” she said to the field commander. “Your men killed one of their own and they have a responsibility to do right by his family.”
The field commander walked around the table and over to where Martina stood. Up close she could see he had beautiful green eyes. No movement in them, but beautiful.
“My men kill Northerners and traitors,” he said. “Which of those is your husband?”
Polk tugged at the field commander’s shirt sleeve, pleading with him to come talk to her alone inside the trailer. The two walked to the home, leaving Martina standing amidst the fighters, many of whom had stopped what they were doing to watch.
“You got some balls talking to him that way,” one of them said. “I’ve seen him shoot men for saying less.”
“I don’t care what you’ve seen,” Martina replied.
In a while the field commander and Polk emerged from the trailer. The man approached Martina.
“Tomorrow at dawn there’s a bus coming up the road along the east bank. It’s headed to Mississippi, up to Camp Patience. Because this lady here vouched for you and because of what her men gave to the cause, I’ll send word that if you and your children are there tomorrow, they’re to make room for you.”
“You’re telling me to take my kids to a refugee camp?”
“I’m telling you to do what suits you.”
The field commander turned back to the maps on the table. “Go on now,” he said. “Nothing more for you here.”
Martina looked around her at the assembled soldiers.
“Not one of you man enough to speak up? None of you got mothers, none of you got kids?”
The men continued to watch her, some of them cold, others snickering. None spoke.
Martina left them where they stood and marched back the way she came. At the edge of the sorghum field Polk caught up to her.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said. “I did the best I could.”
“So we’re not Northerners because we’re from the South, and we’re not Southerners because we tried to move north,” Martina said. “Tell me what we are, then. Tell me what we are.”
Polk gave a piece of paper to Martina. On it was scribbled the time and location where the bus would be the following morning. “It’s not so bad at the camp, Martina,” she said. “They got good food—food straight from the aid ships, and free too. And they got places for the children to play. You’ll be safe there.”
“We’ll be cattle there.”
Polk pointed west. “Honey, it’s for the good of your children. They say the fighting’s closer to us now than ever before, and moving further east every day. The traitors in the Louisiana guard are letting the Blues march right onto our land, and they don’t care who they kill. In Patience you’ll be among your own. Your children will be safe, Martina. What else matters but that?”
Martina looked into the small steady eyes of her neighbor. “I’m staying in my home,” she said. “I’m going to claim my husband’s body and I’m going to bury him on his land and I’m going to stay in my home and if the war comes to my door then let it. I’m done waiting on the good favor of little boys with guns.”
“I did the best I could,” Polk said. “But you shouldn’t have said what you did about his people killing one of their own. They’re very sensitive to that.”
WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME Martina found Sarat buried up to her neck in mud by the riverbank. The girl squealed with delight as her brother piled on handfuls of the brown sludge. Dana sat on a nearby stump, watching with vague disapproval.
When he saw his mother Simon sprung to his feet. “She asked me to,” he said.
“Dig her out and get cleaned up,” Martina said. “And then go to bed.”
“Mama, Simon called you a liar,” Dana said.
“I did not,” Simon replied. He threw a scoop of mud in Dana’s direction.
“I won’t tell you again,” Martina said.
The children marched up the embankment. Sarat skipped ahead of them, slick with mud, the brackish scent of the earth latched on to her skin. She undressed as she walked, dispatching her overalls in the dirt path behind her, and stepped into the shower. Of the three children, she had the darkest skin; Dana and Simon had inherited the brown of their father, Sarat the black of her mother.
Martina brought a change of clothes for her daughter and left them on an upturned water bucket by the stall. Soon the children had all washed and changed. One by one they kissed their mother and retreated into the house.
Martina sat alone on the hickory chair. She ate the sandwich crusts the children had left behind, and the last wet remnants of the canned meat. Still hungry, she stepped quietly into the house and took from the refrigerator a packet of apricot-flavored gel. It was an orange-colored paste of gelatinous texture. It came in a plain silver packet and had once been part of a military ration kit. In the South such kits, sold or discarded or given away, inevitably found their way to the gray market, where they were ripped open and their parts sold off individually. It was highly prized food, not for its taste but because of its utility, the energy it provided.
Instead of returning to the hickory chair, Martina found herself walking—not east to the river or north to the sorghum fields but west, behind the house and along the little-used paths that cut back through the brown-capped weeds to what remained of the inland town.
In the early winter, when the weather cooled and demand for labor grew, this was the route her husband took to the factory in Donaldsonville. There was a shuttle bus that stopped close to the Chestnuts’ property, but most days he chose to walk. He followed the footpath through the weeds to where it met a country road. Two miles in, the road crossed a pair of unused railway tracks, thick bushels of grass growing between the crossties.
Martina walked the same road toward the tracks. She moved carefully, cognizant of the deep fissures and cracks in which an ankle could easily turn. Where they still stood and their autonomous solar panels still functioned, a few roadside lights cast white halos on the ground. Otherwise the road was dark.
Just east of where the road met the tracks there stood the ruins of a small farmhouse once owned by friends of Martina’s parents. Near the house was a cotton field, long ago gone to seed.
Martina left the road and walked along the dirt driveway. Ahead of her, the simple wooden farmhouse stood frozen in mid-collapse. A cascade of storms coming off the Mississippi Sea had slowly pushed the walls from their moorings, but not enough to bring the structure down. Instead the home leaned visibly to the west, a teetering parallelogram.
Every once in a while, when she needed time alone, Martina came to this place. But for the occasional beer bottle or empty cigarette pack left on the front steps by a drifter, the home never showed signs of life. At the western end of the property there stood a many-limbed pecan tree. Long ago, from its thickest branch, the family hung a tire swing. Since childhood this place was Martina’s refuge. Beyond the tree, the land was flat and the view unsoiled for what seemed to be the entirety of western Louisiana.
But in the darkness there was nothing to be seen, the sky a uniform black. Only the Birds flew overhead—soundless warring craft designed to spy and to kill from great distance, their movement and intent once controlled by men in faraway places, who had only the grainy, pixelated footage of vaporized targets to gnaw on their conscience. Early in the war, the Birds were the Union’s most effective weapon, until a group of rebels detonated a bomb at the military server farm that kept the drones under the control of their remote pilots. Now the machines, powered by the solar panels that lined their wings, flew rogue, abandoned to the skies, their targets and trajectories random.
She sat on the well-worn swing. The branch gave a little, letting out a faint squeak as Martina’s weight pulled the rope tight into the rut in the bark.
She ripped open the gel packet and scooped the orange gunk into her mouth with her finger. Because of its texture the food could not be chewed with any conviction; she mashed it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, letting it slide down her throat. It tasted not of apricot but of apricot perfume, of apricots as envisioned by engineers unfamiliar with the fruit as it existed in the natural world. In a minute she felt the sugar coursing through her nerve endings.
She heard the sound of shuffling feet. Startled, she began to ask who was there, but stopped, frozen solid. The shuffling came closer, until it was nearly upon her. That was when she finally saw the source of the sound—an emaciated, mangy dog wandering blind through the empty field. It was a foxhound. It moved slow and reticent toward her, probing for any sign of hostility.
Martina squeezed the last of the apricot gel onto her palm and held it out to the dog. It sniffed at the food. Though starved, the dog paused to consider the gel and then turned away.
Martina looked up. A small orange dawn suddenly lit up the sky.
It was a half-dome of bright light on the horizon, visible only for a few seconds. Then it was gone.
In a moment it came again, and this time in its wake a horn of flame shot high into the night sky. It hung in the air for a few seconds, sustained, and then retreated. The sight offered no sound, each wave of illumination as though in a vacuum.
Then came a half-sun to dwarf the previous bursts of light, and a few seconds later a roar unlike anything Martina had ever heard. The sound collided with her chest and sent her tumbling backward off the swing. She fell to the dirt, staring dumbstruck, her ears overwhelmed by a dull ringing. The foxhound yelped and fled. And then Martina too was running, back in the direction of her children and her home.
She sprinted, summoning the legs of her youth. A quarter-mile down the road, her lungs burning, a bang even louder than the one before it shook her off her feet once more. By the time she’d reached her home, winded and bracing against the porch railing for support, two more explosions had shattered the night.
She found her children inside the house, frantic. The twins were huddled together on the floor near their parents’ bed, Sarat hugging her wailing sister. Simon was at the front of the house, trying to swing shut the shipping container’s hopelessly rusted door, which the family rarely had reason to close in the summertime.
“Where were you?” he asked his mother. “What’s happening?”
Martina grabbed her son by the arm and pulled him to the back of her house. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just a factory down the way caught fire. It’s just a sound, it won’t harm us.”
She sat on the floor by her children and held them close. She pulled a little-used blanket from the space below her bed and wrapped it around herself and her daughters. “It’s just a factory down the way caught fire,” she said. “It’s just a loud sound, that’s all. It’ll be over soon.” The more she repeated it, the truer it became.
THE ERUPTIONS DID NOT RELENT until the early dawn, arriving with unpredictable frequency and severity. By the end of it exhaustion had desensitized the children—the twins curled up against their mother’s breast, Simon seated on the floor beside them, unmoving, watching the sunlight seep through the window.
Martina stared ahead at the entrance to her home, waiting. In the wake of the explosions she listened now for small sounds—footsteps, whispered directives, the cocking of a gun. None came. There was only the distressed clucking of the chickens and the audible pulse of the crickets and the sound of her children breathing.
Look what stubbornness took from you already, she thought. Don’t let it take any more.
She motioned to her son. “You think you can get us across the river in your boat?”
“Yes,” Simon said without hesitation.
“Go on to your room—quiet so you won’t wake the girls—and pack as many change of clothes as you can get into your backpack.”
“Why?” Simon asked.
“Hurry now. I’m counting on you to get us across the river. Your father’s counting on you.”
The boy stood up quietly. Martina waited until he was done packing and then she stood up and carried the girls, still groggy and half-asleep, to their beds. She set them down and instantly they dozed off again. While they slept, she pulled the Chestnuts’ biggest piece of luggage—an old bronze-detailed suitcase that once belonged to her grandmother—from under the bed. It was deep and wide and brittle at its copper hinges. Stickers covered its sides, each commemorating a visit to some historic site or state park that Martina knew only from the schoolbooks of her youth.
She laid the suitcase open on the bed; the room filled with the smell of mothballs. Inside she found a couple of pens and a cracked frame with no photo inside. She tossed these things on the floor. She opened her dresser drawers and began stuffing the suitcase with clothes and toiletries. Instantly and without thinking, she developed a hierarchy of need, starting closest to the skin and working outward—tampons, underwear, dresses. She packed two towels and two rolls of toilet paper and a packet of wet-naps. When the suitcase was almost full she stopped and went to the kitchen. She took jars and containers of the least perishable foods—jams, peanut butter, all the remaining military rations. She took the large plastic soda containers and emptied their contents outside in the dirt, and then refilled them from the tap connected to the rainwater tank. She packed the suitcase until it threatened not to close. She sat on it to keep it shut but the old clasps would not hold, and so she took two of her husband’s belts from the dresser and tied them to each other and looped them around the suitcase to keep it from bursting open. Then she found Sarat’s and Dana’s matching Minnie Mouse backpacks and filled them with the girls’ clothes.
She went outside. Around the south-facing side of the house, near the firewood stove, there was a wide-mouthed drainage pipe that ran from the roof of the home but was connected to nothing. The pipe was sealed shut at its top and bottom. She knelt to the ground and unsealed the bottom cover. A little bit of brown water trickled out of the pipe. She reached inside and felt for a coffee jar. She tugged on it until it came out. She opened the jar and counted its contents: five hundred dollars in American money; another three hundred in Louisiana Assistance Equivalents; three 16-sheets of prewar stamps; two thousand dollars’ worth of rebel currency issued by the New Zouaves in the very first days of the war and virtually worthless now as a trade currency, but which Benjamin suspected might one day be valuable as a historical curiosity; and a broken Rolex wristwatch that once belonged to Martina’s great-grandfather.
WHEN SHE HAD FINISHED PACKING, Martina set the bags out in the front yard and went inside to wake the girls. They gazed at her, glass-eyed, still exhausted and incoherent.
“Girls, we’re going to go on a little adventure,” she said. “We’re going to cross the river together, all right?”
At the mention of adventure, Sarat perked up. “Why are we crossing the river, Mama?”
“Because we have to go live in a new house for a little while, honey.”
“Are we going to go see Daddy?”
“Yeah, honey, we’re going to see Daddy. Now go on, let’s get you dressed. We’ve got to get moving.”
As she and the girls prepared to leave, Martina removed from the bottom of her jewelry box a couple of photos of her and her husband. They were ancient things, taken with her grandfather’s camera. She tucked them into her dress.
She walked to the front of the home, where she found Sarat on her tiptoes, struggling to lift the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
“Let that be, honey,” Martina said. “We’ll come back for it later.”
“Daddy will want it,” Sarat replied.
“Just leave it for now. We’ve got to go. Daddy will understand.”
“No!” the little girl yelled. With Herculean effort she lifted the statue from the table. It fell into her arms, nearly knocking her over. Sarat hoisted the statue, which was almost as tall as she was, and waddled out the door.
Martina pulled the shipping container’s rusted door shut behind her and held it with a flimsy combination lock she knew would not withstand the teeth of even the smallest bolt-cutter. Then she carried her suitcase and led the girls down the embankment to the waterfront, where Simon and the raft were waiting.
They climbed aboard. The raft bobbed and sagged under their weight. Martina had never ridden on it before. She had only crossed the river a handful of times in the last few years, usually on Alder Smith’s boat whenever he invited the family into town for one of his cookouts. The raft was a child’s thing, unsuited for the crossing, a polyp on the mouth of the Mississippi.
Under the reddening sky the Chestnuts unmoored. Martina took the scoop shovel from her son and began to fight the water. Already she could feel the current pulling them downriver, and she knew by the time they crossed to the eastern bank they’d have to hike a mile or more up the road to reach the place where the bus would be. Wells of sweat formed dark and wide on the arms of her dress; her eyes stung. She continued rowing.
MANY YEARS LATER, in the tents of Camp Patience, Martina would silently curse the day she left her home and took her children willingly into the festering heart of the war-torn South.
What she couldn’t have known that morning was that the rebels, the federal troops, and the Mexican militias ultimately fought to a standstill; the violence never inched any further into Louisiana than it did on that brittle April day when the Chestnuts left their land.
Excerpted from: WITNESS TO DISUNION: EARLY JOURNALISTIC ACCOUNTS OF THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
“FIRST SHOTS OF CIVIL WAR”
At Least 59 Killed, More Than 200 Injured as Fort Jackson Protests Erupt in Bloodshed
March 15, 2074
Danielle Manak, The Charleston Feed
COLUMBIA, S.C.—Federal troops shot at least 59 people dead on Wednesday as the four-day protest at the gates of Fort Jackson turned deadly, marking what many believe is the Columbus government’s first assault in an all-out war on the opposition states.
“Let’s be clear: this was a massacre of South Carolinians, a massacre of Southerners, and a massacre of all who dare raise their voice in protest,” said Governor Davis Brown. “This is a direct statement from the federal government that if you disagree with the Sustainable Future Act, or any decision made in Columbus, you are the enemy and must be destroyed.
“This is a call to war.”
A cadre of Marine guards posted at Gate 2 near Strom Thurmond Boulevard—where protesters have amassed by the hundreds in recent days—opened fire on demonstrators at around noon on Wednesday. The guards were stationed in makeshift towers near a hastily constructed fence intended to keep demonstrators from the base entrance.
The first round of rifle fire appeared to hit several of the protesters at the front of the demonstration. What followed was a panicked stampede by those further back, who trampled over one another while attempting to flee the shooting.
“One second the man in front of me was waving his sign, and the next there was this burst of gunfire, and he dropped like a stone,” said Elijah Miller, who had joined the demonstration early Wednesday morning and managed to make his way near the gate before the shooting began.
“I swear to God that man didn’t have a gun. He wasn’t a threat to anyone, and they shot him dead.”
Witnesses described a scene of carnage following the shooting, with several lifeless bodies lining the roadway and pools of blood clearly visible around them.
A soldier inside Fort Jackson, who was not among the guards stationed at Gate 2, said at least one of the protesters near the front of the demonstration fired a pistol at a chain and lock that held part of the temporary fence in place.
“He must have thought it was an action movie, like he could shoot the lock open or something,” said the soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the troops stationed at the base have been given instructions not to speak to reporters.
The soldier added that, rather than break the lock, the bullet ricocheted back into the crowd.
“At that point, [the protesters] thought they were under fire, and half of them rushed back while the other half rushed forward against the fence.
“As soon as the Marines saw that fence start to strain, they opened fire.”
Many demonstrators dispute that account, saying the Marines were not provoked in any way.
“The cowards on the other side of that fence opened fire for no reason,” said Paul Hartig, who had been camped out in front of the gate for the last three days. “They killed all those people for no reason at all, and they should hang for it.”
Reaction to the killing came swiftly. In Columbus, the ten senators representing the federal-aligned Southern states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee issued a joint statement of condemnation, calling the incident “an unnecessary and tragic provocation that only empowers extremists and does nothing to ease the country from the brink of war.”
In a statement by the Free Southern State’s Council, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina called the killings “outright cold-blooded murder” and an act of tyranny and treason for which federal president Martin Henley himself should stand trial.
“Every Southern patriot, upon hearing the news of the massacre at Fort Jackson, will know now as a fact that the federal government in Columbus considers Southern lives to be less than worthless,” the governors said.
“It is only the willfully blind who can today gaze upon the blood-soaked streets of Columbia and refuse to support the cause of secession.”
Throughout South Carolina, where anti-federal sentiment has run higher than perhaps anywhere outside the Texas oil fields, violence quickly erupted as word of the Fort Jackson killings spread. In Columbia, numerous franchises of Northern-headquartered businesses—many already shuttered in the months since federal president Daniel Ki’s assassination in Jackson, Mississippi, last December—were torched to the ground. In New Charleston, the bodies of three men, accused by citizen secessionist groups of working as intelligence gatherers for the North, were found bound on the shoreline, their throats slit.
“This isn’t only about secession anymore,” said a representative of a South Carolina citizens’ group. “This is about avenging our dead.”
By Wednesday evening, federal president Henley had yet to issue an official statement on the killings. The Department of Defense’s official press site, which has not been updated since Monday, continued to feature a terse statement stating that military officials believe the Marines at Fort Jackson are “acting with utmost restraint.”
Gov. Brown, who had previously called for all Northern sympathizers in South Carolina to leave the state, repeated that call on Wednesday, and asked for his citizens’ help in the cause of resistance.
“The wholesale slaughter of our people is not something to be negotiated. It is not the subject of concessions or compromise,” said Gov. Brown.
“From what has been done today in Fort Jackson, there is no going back.”